Facebook blocks Twitter's Vine users from accessing friends

Not cool, Facebook

Reports arrived at the end of the week that Facebook had blocked users from accessing their friends lists through Vine.

When it launched on Thursday, Vine featured a "find people" button meant to search through a user's Facebook friends.

But Facebook reportedly blocked the feature, and now it results in an error message that says Vine is not authorized to access Facebook.

Social showdown

The rivalry between Facebook and Twitter heated up over the last year, and now it seems the two are determined not to get along.

Of course, if most users got their way, both social networks would coexist - at least that's how it seems, given how many of our Facebook friends have linked their Twitter accounts to publish tweets as Facebook status updates. That little blue bird is all over the news feed.

Then again, when have social networking companies ever put the interests of users ahead of their own?

TechRadar asked Facebook determine for certain whether the company is intentionally blocking Vine users and whether that could change in the future. The company has not yet responded, however.

Facebook Director of Platform Partnerships and Operations Justin Osofsky did post an update to Facebook's developer blog on Friday writing, "For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you're doing."

But "for a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we've had policies against this that we are further clarifying today."